Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  “Patients need to bond with someone in order to create a complex personality. They have to be controlled, carefully manipulated. We were trained to instill that bond, to draw out their capabilities.”

  She folded her arms, compressed her lips. I had the thought that, though none of what she had told me was comedy club material, talking about her role in things distressed her more than the rest.

  “If the other therapists are good-looking as you,” I said, “I bet that instilling thing goes pretty easily.”

  That seemed to distress her further.

  “Come on, cher,” I said. “You going to be just fine. Y’all can be a significant asset for Billy, and that works to your advantage.”

  She leaned forward, putting a hand on my knee; the touch surprised me. “Mister Lamb,” she said, and I said, without intending to, “Jack. You can call me Jack.”

  “I want to be able to count on you, Jack. Can I count on you?”

  “I told you I don’t have any control over the situation.”

  “But can you be a friend? That’s all I’m asking. Can we count on you to be a friend?”

  Those big brown eyes were doing a job on me, but I resisted them. “I haven’t ever been much good as a friend. It’s a character flaw, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t believe that.” She sat back, adjusting her T-shirt so it fit more snugly. “You can call me Jo.”

  I contacted Billy Pitch, though not during prime time, fearing I might interrupt The Surreal Life or Wife Swap, and I told him what I had learned, omitting any mention of the “remarkable powers” that might soon be Pellerin’s, stressing instead his developing visual capacity. I wasn’t sure why I did this—perhaps because I thought that Billy, already powerful, needed no further inducement to use his strength intemperately. He professed amazement at what I had to say, then slipped into business mode.

  “I got an idea, but it needs to simmer, so I’m going to stash you away for a while,” he said. “Get everybody ready to travel tonight.”

  “By ‘everybody,’” I said, “you don’t mean me, right? I got deals cooking. I have to…”

  “I’ll handle them for you.”

  “Billy, some of what I got going requires the personal touch.”

  “Are you suggesting I can’t handle whatever piddly business it is you got?”

  “No, that’s not it. But there’s…”

  “You’re not going to thwart me in this, are you, Jack?”

  “No,” I said helplessly.

  “Good! Call my secretary and tell her what needs doing. I’ll see it gets done.”

  That night we were flown by private jet to an airstrip in South Florida, and then transported by cigarette boat to Billy’s estate in the Keys. Absent from our party was Dr. Crain. I never got to know the man. Each time I walked him to the john or gave him food, he railed at me, saying that I didn’t know who I was dealing with, I didn’t understand what was involved, causing such a ruckus that I found it easier to keep him bound and gagged in a separate room. I warned him that he was doing himself no good acting this way, yet all he did was tell me again I didn’t know who I was dealing with and threaten me with corporate reprisals. When it was time to leave, I started to untie him, but Huey dropped a hand onto my shoulder and said, “Billy say to let him be.”

  “He’s a doctor,” I said. “He’s the only one knows what’s going on. What if Pellerin gets sick or something?”

  “Billy say let him be.”

  I tried to call Billy, but was met with a series of rebuffs from men as constricted by the literal limits of their orders as Huey. Their basic message was, “Billy can’t be disturbed.” Crain’s eyes were wide, fixed on me; his nostrils flared above the gag when he tried to speak. I made to remove it, but Huey once again stayed my hand.

  “Let him talk,” I said. “He might…”

  “What he going to say, Jack?” Huey’s glum, wicked face gazed down at me. “You know there ain’t nothing to say?”

  He steered me into the corridor, closed the door behind us and leaned against it. “Get a move on,” he said. “Ain’t nothing you can do, so you might as well not think about it.”

  Yet I did think about it as I descended the stair and walked along the corridor and out into the drizzly New Orleans night. I thought about Crain waiting in that stuffy little room, about whether or not he knew what was coming, and I thought that if I didn’t change the way things were headed, I might soon be enduring a similar wait myself.

  Some weeks later I watched a videotape that captured Jo’s interaction with one of the short-lived zombies whose passage from death to life and back again she had overseen at Tulane. By then, I had become thoroughly acquainted with Pellerin and the zombie on the tape didn’t interest me nearly as much as Jo’s performance. She tempted and teased his story out of him with the gestures and movements of a sexier-than-average ballerina, exaggerated so as to make an impression on the man’s dim vision, and I came to realize that all of her movements possessed an element of this same controlled grace. Whether she was doing this by design, I had no clue; by that time I had tumbled to the fact that she was a woman who hid much from herself, and I doubted that she would be able to shed light on the matter.

  Over the space of a month, Pellerin grew from a man whom I had mistaken for dead money into a formidable presence. He was stronger, more vital in every way, and he began to generate what I can only describe as a certain magnetism—I felt the back of my neck prickle whenever he came near, though the effect diminished over the days and weeks that followed. And then there were his eyes. On the same day I interrogated Jo, I was escorting him to the john when he said, “Hey, check this out!, Small Time.” He snatched off his sunglasses and brought his eyes close to mine. I was about to make a sarcastic remark, when I noticed a green flickering in his irises.

  “What the fuck!” I said.

  Pellerin grinned. “Looks like a little ol’ storm back in there, doesn’t it?” I asked him what it was and he told me the flickers, etched in an electric green, signaled the bacteria impinging on the optic nerve.

  “They’re bioluminescent,” he said. “Weird, huh? Jocundra says it’s going to get worse before it gets better. People are going to think I’m the goddamn Green Lantern.”

  Though he had changed considerably since that day, his attitudes toward almost everyone around him remained consistently negative—he was blunt, condescending, an arrogant smart-ass. Yet toward Jo, his basic stance did change. He grew less submissive and often would challenge her authority. She adapted by becoming more compliant, but I could see that she wasn’t happy, that his contentiousness was getting to her. She still was able to control him by means of subtle and not-so-subtle manipulation, but how long that control would last was a matter for conjecture.

  The island where we were kept was Billy’s private preserve. It was shaped roughly like a T, having two thin strips of land extending out in opposite directions from the west end. Billy’s compound took up most of the available space. Within a high white brick wall topped by razor wire were a pool, outbuildings (including a gym and eight bungalows), a helicopter pad, and a sprawling Florida-style ranch house that might have been designed by an architect with a Lego fetish—wings diverged off the central structure and off each other at angles such as a child might employ, and I guessed that from the air it must resemble half a crossword puzzle. There were flat screen TVs in every room, even the johns, and all the rooms were decorated in a fashion that I labeled haute mafia. The dining room table was fashioned from a fourteenth century monastery door lifted from some European ruin. The rugs were a motley assortment of modern and antique. Some of the windows were stained glass relics, while others were jalousies; but since heavy drapes were drawn across them, whatever effect had been intended was lost. Every room was home to a variety of antiquities: Egyptian statuary, Greek amphorae, Venetian glassware, German tapestries, and so on. In my bathroom, the toilet was carved from a single block of marble, and mounted on t
he wall facing it, a section of a Persian bas-relief, was yet another flat screen. It was as if someone with the sensibility of a magpie had looted the world’s museums in order to furnish the place, and yet the decor was so uniformly haphazard, I had the impression that Billy was making an anti-fashion statement, sneering at the concept of taste. Elvis would have approved. In fact, had he seen the entirety of Billy’s house, he would have returned home to Graceland and redecorated.

  Beyond the wall was jungly growth that hid the house completely. The beach was a crescent of tawny sand fringed by palms and hibiscus shrubs and Spanish bayonet, protected by an underwater fence. A bunkerlike guard house stood at the foot of the concrete pier to which the cigarette boat was moored, and a multicultural force (Cuban, white, African-American) patrolled within and without the walls. The guards, along with gardeners and maids, were housed in the bungalows, but they entered the house frequently to check on us. If we stepped outside they would dog us, their weapons shouldered, keeping a distance, alert to our every movement. It was easier to find privacy inside the house. Relative privacy, at any rate. Knowing Billy, I was certain that the rooms were bugged, and I had given up on the idea that I could keep anything from him. Whenever Pellerin and jo were closeted in their rooms, I would walk along corridors populated by suits of armor and ninja costumes fitted to basketwork men and gilt French chairs that, with their curved legs and positioned between such martial figures, looked poised for an attack. I would poke into rooms, examine their collection of objets d’art, uniformly mismatched, yet priceless. Sometimes I would wonder if I dared slip one or two small items into my pocket, but most of my thoughts were less concerned with gain than with my forlorn prospects for survival.

  Occasionally in the course of these forays, I would encounter a maid, but never anyone else, and thus I was surprised one afternoon when, upon entering a room in the northernmost wing with a four-poster bed and a fortune in gee-gaws littering the tables and bureaus, I saw Jo standing by the entrance to a walk-in closet, inspecting the dresses within. She gave a start when I spoke her name, then offered a wan smile and said, “Hello.”

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Browsing.” She touched the bodice of a green silk dress. “These clothes must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They’re all designer originals.”

  “No, I meant aren’t you supposed to be with Pellerin.”

  “I need breaks from Josey,” she said. “His intensity gets to me after a while. And he’s getting more independent, he wants time to himself. So…” She shrugged. “I like to come here and look at the clothes.”

  She stepped into the closet and I moved into the room so I could keep her in view.

  “He must bring a lot of women here,” she said. “He’s got every imaginable size.”

  “It’s hard for me to think of Billy as a sexual being.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You’d have to know him. I’ve never seen him with a woman on his arm, but I suppose he has his moments.”

  She went deeper into the closet, toyed with the hem of a dress that bore a pattern like a moth’s wing, all soft grays and greens, a touch of brown.

  I perched on the edge of the bed. “Why don’t you try it on?”

  “Do you think he’d mind?” she asked.

  “Go for it.”

  She hesitated, then said, “I’ll just be a second,” and closed the closet door.

  The idea that she was getting naked behind the door inspired a salacious thought or two—I was already more than a little smitten. When she came out, she was barefoot. She did a pirouette and struck a fashion magazine pose. I was dumbstruck. The dress was nearly diaphanous, made of some feathery stuff that clung to her hips and flat stomach and breasts, the flared skirt reaching to mid-thigh.

  “You like?” she asked. “It’s a little short on me.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  She laughed delightedly and went for another spin. “I could never afford this. Not that I care all that much about clothes. But if I had a couple of million, I’d probably indulge.”

  Shortly thereafter she went back inside the closet, re-emerging wearing her jeans and a nondescript top. It seemed that she had exchanged personalities as well as clothes, for she was once again somber and downcast. “I’ve got to get back,” she said.

  “So soon?”

  She stopped by the door. “I come here most days about this time,” she said. “A little earlier, actually.” Then, after a pause, she added, “It’s nice having someone to wear clothes for.”

  We started meeting every day in that room. It was plain that she was flirting with me, and I imagine it was equally plain that I was interested, but it went on for over a month and neither one of us made a move. For my part, the fear of rejection didn’t enter in. I was used to the man-woman thing being a simple negotiation—you either did the deed or you took a pass—but I thought if I did make a move, I might frighten her off, that she needed to feel in control. If I had been free of constraint, my own agent, I might have given up on her…or maybe I wouldn’t have. She was the kind of woman who required a period of courtship, who enjoyed the dance as much as the feast, and she caused you to enjoy it as well. Basically an unhappy soul, she gave the impression of being someone who had been toughened by trouble in her life; but whenever she was happy, there was something so frail and girlish about the mood, I believed the least disturbance could shatter it. I grew more entranced by her and more frustrated day-by-day, but I told myself that not getting involved was for the best—I needed to keep clear of emotional entanglements and concentrate on how to stay alive once Billy came back into the picture. That didn’t prevent me, however, from exploring certain of her fantasies.

  I knew that she had been married when she was a teenager and one morning while we sat on the bed, her cross-legged at the head and me sort of side-saddle at the foot, I asked her about it. She ran a finger along a newel post, tracing the pattern carved into it, and said, “It was just…foolishness. We thought it would be romantic to get married.”

  “I take it, it wasn’t.”

  She gave a wan laugh. “No.”

  “Would you ever do it again?”

  “Marry? I don’t know. Maybe.” She smiled. “Why? Are you asking?”

  “Maybe. Tell me what type of man it is you’d marry. Let’s see if I fit the bill.”

  She lay down on her side, her legs drawn up, and considered the question.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “You’re serious? You want me to do this?”

  “Let’s hear it, cher. Your ideal man.”

  “Well…” She sat up, fluffed the pillow, and lay down again. “I’d want him to have lots of money, so maybe a financier. Not a banker or anything boring like that. A corporate tiger. Someone who would take over a failing company and reshape it into something vital.”

  “Money’s the most important qualification?”

  “Not really, but you asked for my ideal and money makes things easier.”

  She had on a blouse with a high collar and, as often happened when thinking, she tucked in her chin and nibbled the edge of the collar. I found the habit sexy and, whenever she did it, I wanted to touch her face.

  “He’d be a philanthropist,” she said. “And not just as a tax dodge. He’d have to be devoted to it. And he’d have an introspective side. I’d want him to know himself. To understand himself.”

  “A corporate raider with soul. Isn’t that a contradiction?”

  “It can happen. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive and a great poet.”

  “I like to think of myself as an entrepreneur when I’m feeling spunky. That’s like a financier, but I’m getting that we’re talking about two different animals.”

  “You’ve got possibilities,” she said, and smiled. “You just need molding.”

  “How about in the looks department?” I asked. “Something George Clooney-ish? Or Brad Pitt?”

  She wrink
led her nose. “Movie stars are too short. Looks aren’t important, anyway.”

  “Women all say that, but it’s bullshit.”

  “It’s true! Women have the same kind of daydreams as men, but when it comes to choosing a man they often base their choices on different criteria.”

  “Like money.”

  “No! Like how someone makes you feel. It’s not quantifiable. I would never have thought I could…”

  She broke off, thinning her lips.

  “You would never have thought what?”

  “This is silly,” she said. “I should check on Josey.”

  “You never would have thought you could be attracted to someone you met at gunpoint?”

  She sat up, swung her legs off the side of the bed, but said nothing.

  “You might as well confess, cher,” I said. “You won’t be giving away any secrets.”

  She stiffened, as if she were going to lash out at me, but the tension drained from her body. “It’s the Stockholm Syndrome,” she said.

  “You reckon that’s it? We are for sure stuck on this damn island, and there’s not a whole lot to distract us. And technically I am an accomplice in your kidnapping. But there’s more to it than that.”

  “You’re probably right,” she said, coming to her feet. “If we’d met on our own in New Orleans, I’d probably have been attracted to you. But that’s neither here nor there.”

  “Why not? Because Pellerin’s your priority?”

  She shrugged as if to say, yes.

  “Duty won’t keep you warm at night,” I said.

  “Keeping warm has never been my biggest goal in life,” she said with brittle precision. “But should that change, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

  I didn’t go outside much. The guards made me nervous. When I did it was usually to have a swim, but some nights I went along the shore through a fringe of shrubs and palms to the west end, the crosspiece of the T, a place from which, if the weather was clear, I could make out the lights on a nearby Key. And on one such night, emerging from dense undergrowth onto a shingle of crushed coral and sand, littered with vegetable debris, I spotted a shadow kneeling on the beach. Wavelets slapping against the shingle covered the sound of my approach and I saw it was Pellerin. I hadn’t realized he could walk this far without help. He was holding a hand out above the water, flexing his fingers. It looked as if he were about to snatch something up. Beneath his hand the water seethed and little waves rolled away from shore. It was such a mediocre miracle, I scarcely registered it at first; but then I realized that he must be causing this phenomenon, generating a force that pushed the waves in a contrary direction. He turned his head toward me. The green flickers in his eyes stood out sharply in the darkness. A tendril of fear uncoiled in my backbrain.